Brink Preview

Share.

Splash Damage and Bethesda take first-person shooters to the Brink.

By Martin Robinson

Brink is many things; a game that meshes single-player and multiplayer into one seamless whole, a game that brings hardcore PC ethics to the console audience and a game that's overflowing with style. It's all these things and much, much more - but one thing that sticks after our recent extended look at it is this: Brink is one seriously loud game.

Maybe it's the way the crack and ping of gunfire bounces around the corrugated iron shelter where our demo takes place, or maybe it's the awesome amp setup that makes each gunfight feel like someone's playing the spoons on our eardrums. Either way, when we meet with the game's senior designer Ed Stern an hour later, there's still a ringing in our ears.

Brink's characters are cartoonish and photorealistic all at once - their eyes in particular are uncannily human.

"Our audio director is Chris Sweetman, who was audio director on Black and Burnout Paradise," Stern tells us by way of explanation. "He's a maniac – and I say that with love – but he's an absolute maniac. Already the audio's better on this than it's been on our last two games."

He's not the only high-profile hire behind the game; the resumés of Brink's staff read like a list of the great and good of the past few years. "Our lead level designer is Neil Alphonso from Killzone 2 – and also we've got pretty hardcore level design department including Dave Johnson who did Dust [a revered Counter Strike map], which you may have played at some point – our art director Olivier Leonardi worked on the first Prince of Persia, lead character artist Tim Applebly did Shepherd for Mass Effect and our lead coder, Dean Calver, did Heavenly Sword…"

This is Splash Damage's first foray onto consoles following the critical darlings that were the Enemy Territory games (the somewhat less successful console version of Quake Wars was handled by a different team), and it's an undertaking they're not taking lightly. "We made a point of going out to hire the very best people," says Stern. "We've had to grow – we've come from this hardcore PC background and we didn't have the expertise to make this game, we had to go out and get it and persuade them to trust us: it's going to be good."

The story centres around the Ark, a floating city at sea.

Brink has clear links to Splash Damage's earlier games – at its very core there lies the strong-beating heart of an objective-based multiplayer game, with it's skirmishes played out on large maps and with a strong taste for character progression and the doling out of experience points. All of which are solid, if unremarkable, foundations for a contemporary first-person shooter. What makes Brink remarkable, however, is the game's multitude of trimmings.

First up is an approach to movement that, while brazenly borrowing from DICE's Mirror's Edge, revitalises first-person shooting. Centred around the SMART button (that's Smart Movement Across Random Terrain, acronym lovers) it offers an athleticism that's unprecedented in such a game. One example best highlights its function; when faced with a doorway latticed with infrared security beams, the player has three options. The first one's simple enough - run head-on, trigger the alarm and prepare to fight.

The other two are both facilitated by the SMART button - look up as you approach the obstacle and it prompts a vault, look down and it sends the player into a slide underneath the beams. Both moves are conveyed with convincingly weighty full body animations, and the feature's functions stretch well beyond the basic example we're first given - later on, for instance, we see the player leap up to overhanging platforms and across small chasms. It's a feature that makes for motion that's as kinetic as its gunplay, and it more than lives up to its name.